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In 6 Months, Australia Bans More Than 240 Games
dotarray writes with this snippet from (apropos) Player Attack: In the 20 years from 1995 to January 2015, there were 77 games Refused Classification in Australia. After January though, more than 240 games have been effectively banned by the Classification Board — an average of 40 per month. Most of these games are mobile- or digital-only releases you're unlikely to have ever heard of, with names like League Of Guessing, 'w21wdf AB test,' Sniper 3D Assault Zombie, Measure Bra Size Prank, and Virtual Marijuana Smoking showing up in just the first few pages. What games are banned in your country?
Just imagine all those games get that free advertising. "Banned in Australia" could become the new measure of how cool a game is.
From TFA
While this current trial will only last 12 months initially ...
So the Oz government has signed up with a global, unified ratings system from the IARC. And all that is required from the game publishes is to submit answers to a bunch of questions to set a ratings level for their game. For free.
Sure, the OZ government has probably tailored how the answers to the question map into the desired Australian ratings system, but this sounds like a great step forward with consistency and transparency. Also from TFA
It's worth noting that the IARC has also submitted plenty of games which have been accepted by the Classification Board - we're still figuring out the exact number, but there are hundreds of digital/mobile only games classified R18+, MA15+, M, PG and G which have passed through the IARC process.
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I agree, in US fewer and fewer games are banned (as a percent of all video games). This is because the number of avenues for games publishing is mushrooming, opening the door for many devs to publish games that wouldn't have gotten wide exposure before. At the same time, the costs of game development is dropping, creating a space for indie devs who aren't making the next AAA shooter.
This creates a vibrant scene where we're seeing games about topics that would have been unthinkable before, because they would have been considered unviable and not worth the investment. Games about censorship. Games about cancer. Games about all sorts of topics, including ones that would be banned under traditional media, either by a govt agency or through self-censorship.
It's the golden age of gaming!
nope, it means the game was refused classification and it is illegal to sell it or import. Even after they opened up the classification laws we still have a range of games that will never be legal to be sold here, anything that shows illegal drug use, violence on woman etc etc. The summary makes it sound like the bans have gotten worse, in actual fact the laws have become far more relaxed here in the last few years with the introduction of an R classification, just the proliferation of people trying to cash in on cheap gimmick apps to attract immature buyers has increased 100 fold.
The game Mino is banned in the U.S. because a district court ruled three years ago that The Tetris Company owns the exclusive right to make falling block video games using the seven one-sided tetrominoes. Tetris v. Xio . And I expect an eventual lawsuit against the Free Software Foundation over M-x tetris in GNU Emacs because Tetris co-founder Alexey Pajitnov believes that free software "should never have existed" because it "destroys the market".
cock fighting, bear baiting, and tackle football (NFL doesn't like it, anymore).
Mortal Kombat was banned simultaneously in Australia, Germany, U.K. and several other countries on what became known as Mortal Monday, 1993.
Fatality!
I read about this and I'm really glad I don't live in Australia right now. America still has SOME freedom left although it is rapidly dwindling.
Read TFA .. the ESRB has signed up to the same service as Australia and both Goole Play and Firefox Marketplace support the IARC.
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A 30 second unskippable ad before a 45 second video, probably inserted by a "rights holder", raises an important point. Rhythm games are a minefield for patents, sync rights, and master rights. If Didgeridoo Hero were real, I wouldn't be surprised if it were banned in at least one major market for failure to secure the appropriate licenses.
fine, it's the silver age, like marvel/stan lee.
Australia has had authoritarian, paternalistic governments since, at least, the end of WWII. Consequently, the best and brightest tend to leave the country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_diaspora). This leaves Australia with two major pastimes: digging coal out of the ground and selling houses to one another.
nope, it means the game was refused classification and it is illegal to sell it or import. Even after they opened up the classification laws we still have a range of games that will never be legal to be sold here, anything that shows illegal drug use, violence on woman etc etc. The summary makes it sound like the bans have gotten worse, in actual fact the laws have become far more relaxed here in the last few years with the introduction of an R classification, just the proliferation of people trying to cash in on cheap gimmick apps to attract immature buyers has increased 100 fold.
This is also something that is never and realistically can never be enforced.
By the sounds of it, most of the games are mobile games (I still have trouble accepting mobile games as proper games, they're the modern equivalent of the old flash games I used to play in a browser in the early 00's) so a lot of the sales will never take place in Australia, the method of distribution doesn't take place in Australia and the method of distribution is pretty much unstoppable. This is just government bureaucracy trying to say it's doing something.
However this is the kind of shit that happens when elect an ultra conservative government. As an Australian this wasn't even on my radar and realistically, still isn't because we have so many other problems such as the government trying to make it possible for them to strip citizenship (in the name of fighting teh terr'sts), trying to neuter the ABC, trying to strip the public health and education systems, increasing unemployment and destroying the economy. Australia elected it's own George W Bush in Tony Abbott and yes, we were warned.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
the OP had it best. they can be effectively banned if they won't sell. the publishers will self censor and focus on games that will sell. if walmart, target, gamestop etc refuse to sell a game then that scares the publishers. Combine this with an industry-wide rating system that evaluates content for appropriateness and you have a pretty effective censorship system, at least under the old industry structure. The new way, with google play and other online stores, publishers have much more freedom to explore game content. Apple is still pretty strict about content guidelines, but otherwise there's more freedom.
Australia can't have a game with blood in it and Germany can't have a game with Nazis in it.
the OP had it best. they can be effectively banned if they won't sell. the publishers will self censor and focus on games that will sell. if walmart, target, gamestop etc refuse to sell a game then that scares the publishers.
Note this is different than Australia, where if you are caught trying to import censored video games (or movies), you can be fined and the censored objects will be destroyed.
"People don't want to buy this game" is not the same as censorship.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's a completely different issue and a question of immaterial rights. Not a question of banning on the reason for being morally questionable.
I wonder how many games that will end up having hidden content (easter eggs) with some questionable material not visible when the game is approved.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You can have games with Nazis in it in Germany. But it has to be censored and all Nazi symbology has to be replaced or removed.
For example, the new Wolfenstein game from Bethesda is available, but the swastikas in the German version are replaced by the stylized "W" from "Wolfenstein", and "SS" symbols like the deathshead or the "SS" itself have been removed entirely.
Also, one scene where you wake up in a gas chamber surrounded by corpses has been altered and all corpses have been removed.
The original "Wolfenstein 3D" was completely banned in Germany, because there was no censored version available.
Personally, I think that is bullshit. Nazi symbols are generally illegal in Germany, but allowed under special circumstances such as for "artistic purposes". But then for some reason, they don't have to be removed from movies, such as Indiana Jones... I really don't see the justification for allowing it in movies but forbidding it in video games.
But that's not all. Extreme kinds of violence in videgames are almost always also banned in Germany unless softened for the German market. Fallout 3 for example, where you can blow up individual body parts, is also altered to be less violent.
Germans have been waking up without a helmut since quite some time.
I pity your blinkered view of gaming.
I'll get on with working through my backlog of high quality PC games with gameplay experiences to match anything released historically and often graphics and sound that are far better.
Console ports are lazy and don't represent the high-end of PC gaming, but that doesn't negate the other options available, whether it's indie games that match the AAA games of just a couple of years ago, the AAA games that fully exploit PC capabilities or the esoteric games that reach a market previously unavailable and genuinely do different and interesting things.
Golden age of gaming? Maybe, maybe not, but I've never had access to so many such high quality games before.